Jakob Nielsen confirmed again the banner blindness with his new eye tracking study. He writes:
"Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad. On hundreds of pages, users didn't fixate on ads. The following heatmaps show three examples that cover a range of user engagement with the content: quick scanning, partial reading, and thorough reading. Scanning is more common than reading, but users will sometimes dig into an article if they really care about it."